Historical boats, manned by costumed Venetians, parade on the Grand Canal in the Venice Historical Regatta, held on the first Sunday in September.

AP / LUIGI COSTANTINI

Venice will stun you with its unending beauty and canvas-worthy views, no matter how many times you’ve watched The Italian Job.

On your first day, when you’ve snaked your way halfway through the town and are rapturously gazing through the viewfinder at what will be your 250th photograph, the impossibility of documenting Venice’s beauty will hit you like a 600-year-old brick wall and send you reeling off in search of a Bellini, that luscious white-peach nectar concoction invented at Harry’s Bar.

But to imbibe the tasty, if thimble-sized, cocktail amid the impeccable décor of its storied Venetian home, you’ll first have to find Harry’s Bar, no small feat in a maze-like town that casually requires half a day to find your own hotel. And half the second day to locate it again.

Venice, as everyone knows, grew from a swampy lagoon, so it’s one place where “getting bogged down” carries a literal connotation. Built on islands before the occupation of “city planner” was invented, it’s a labyrinth of walkways with no particular pattern or orientation. Some have street names, and many wind back through a neighborhood for a few intriguing turns and then die against an ancient stone wall — like the box canyons of the West that only the Lone Ranger knew about.

Remember how eight seasoned outlaws would gallop their horses in a cloud of dust between two big boulders, and the Lone Ranger would pull Silver to a dead stop and say meaningfully: “We’ve got ’em now, Tonto: That’s a box canyon”?

That’s how the turistas look, a tight crowd, all jeans and Reeboks and arms gesturing and pointing, clutching unfolded maps and 15-pound single-lens reflex cameras, moving en masse down lanes, cutting off the sunlight, until they veer around that last blind turn and do a face plant on a stone wall that might have been built by Michelangelo’s cousins.

I bloodied my nose on a few Byzantine fortifications, thinking my usual excellent sense of direction would guide me through the rabbit warren of Venice. In those narrow walkways, you can’t see enough of the sky to know where the sun is. And you can’t use that quaint stone footbridge you just passed as a reference point because there are more than 400 just like it around town. Not to mention that every narrow alley, every picturesque canal is just so otherworldly, gorgeous and fascinatingly unique that your brain fogs up and you forget where you are.

Even the guidebooks, which usually take an optimistic tone, will state flatly, “You will get lost in Venice. No amount of map-studying or innate directional skill can prevent it. Don’t take it personally.”

The city’s thoroughfares, called calles, don’t really square with the definition of “street” in an American brain. They’re usually about 6 feet wide, cobbled or bricked or concrete, and serve to separate the buildings, which are three to five stories tall and usually hail from the period between 421 A.D. and maybe 1850. I’m just guessing about the 1850, but I didn’t see anything that looked more recent than the American Civil War.

When Shakespeare wrote about Venice, it had already been a tourism hot spot for 600 years.

And therein lies the charm. There are hundreds of places around Venice where the mortar that was applied over the original brick or stone buildings 300 years later has cracked and come off 100 years after that. And when this happened, say, 300 years ago, did the owners redo it? Call in a trowel man to try to bring it up to code? No, they left it alone. Now the cracked and decaying look is so prized it is emulated by 21st-century condo developers in Florida who paint old brick and cracking plaster on the sides of their brand-new buildings, trying to make them look Italian.

There’s something in us, the desire to witness history, that responds favorably to the sight of plaster that has chipped off stucco that has chipped off cement that has chipped off red bricks that have had the mortar between them pried out by centuries of weather, and the varying layers of exposed repairs overlap like primordial geological strata.

Perhaps we’re enthralled with age because we have none. Venice was already an overbuilt cultural showpiece of Europe when our country was a mud-bog Stairmaster for 50 million buffalo.

And there’s the durability factor. I looked up some paintings by Canaletto from the 1740s — scenes of the Grand Canal and the Basin of San Marco — and everything looks the same. The gondolas are identical today to those in paintings from 268 years ago. Unlike our Chevy Impala.

At some point, it will dawn on you: There are no cars in this town. No honking horns, no exhaust fumes, no gas stations, no parking lots. No traffic lights with lines of 2-ton hunks of steel, rumbling and emitting greenhouse gases and thumping bass notes that vibrate your rib cage.

Everyone walks, everyone sees each other’s face and says “buon giorno” and “grazie” and “prego” and “Cerchiamo Harry’s Bar . . .”

No one buys a week’s worth of groceries. They buy what they can carry over four bridges. They pull it behind them in a satchel with wheels. Almost all the stores are the size of a double-wide walk-in closet. Four customers breeze in, and the place is packed. There are no giant pizzerias, there are scores of tiny ones.

There’s a riot of appealing textures and contrasts everywhere you point the camera. The exposed brick, the herb gardens growing in window planters because there are no green spaces, the clean laundry drying on the line between third-story windows, the clay tile roofs and the carved marble lion heads and gargoyles supporting balconies and rooftop overhangs.

In America, such amenities would be called “outdated” or “low-rent.” But in Venice, they’re unspeakably beautiful.

Then there are the stone churches and basilicas that took 300 years to build, covered with carvings and ornate stonework. The wells in the piazzas look as though they’re left over from the Roman Empire. You’ve got 177 canals and 400 bridges to admire, hardly any of which look alike.

With the various architectural styles of the centuries-old buildings, the unusual textures created by age degradation, the still water mirroring the stately structures and the narrow slice of blue sky above, with casually tied boats and what look like hand-adzed pilings, Venice is an artist’s paradise. A painter can set up his easel at any spot in the city, face in any direction and have a scene worth capturing.

Despite all these attractions, the population of 63,000 is about half what it was a hundred years ago. The high cost of living (the Bellinis cost 15 euros!) has driven out most of the workers, who commute by boat. And, of course, any chamber of commerce would be challenged when word gets around that a city is . . . sinking.

A complex combination of geological effects and changing tide levels has caused Venice to subside about 7 centimeters a century for the past 1,000 years. That’s a 27-inch plunge into the Adriatic Sea.

A ride on the Grand Canal reveals high tide marks that come perilously close to some doorways. Another intriguing subject for a painter.

The Grand Canal bisects the city, winding through it in a big backward “S” and dividing it into six neighborhoods. This is the city’s main thoroughfare and is constantly busy with boat traffic: water taxis, gondolas and work boats laden with goods or possessions, since boats are the only means of moving heavy loads around the city.

The water taxis (vaporetti) are the public transportation, often crammed with 100 people who board and exit in herds at each stop. With a three-day pass (30 euros, $47), you can always find your way to your destination and, more important, back to your hotel.

These prices may seem exorbitant, and they are. The week before my trip, Frommer’s called Venice “hideously expensive,” especially with the weak state of the dollar. But if you want to see Venice, go. Don’t think about the money. And if you’re an artist, be careful what you wish for. The city’s array of choices for subject material could induce sensory overload. You might decide you have to devote your life to painting them.

There are worse fates.